North Pole Weather

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The sun rose this morning at 5:49, long before I did, and will set over 16 hours later at 9:52 this evening. It’s only 3 more days until we lose astronomical twilight, and the sun never dips more than 12° below the horizon.

The last of last year’s local carrots. They’re a good inch through, but so tender I can eat them whole.

It’s finally warmed up and started to feel like spring, or as much as it can with over 20” of snow still on the ground. But we have icicles and puddles, and the birch tree outside my north window is surrounded by seeds dropped onto the snow. Natural selection in action: birch trees that hold on to their seeds until they can drop them on the snow have the snow melt faster around them, which in turn means the soil warms faster. Smart birches!

There are more signs of spring. The Farmers’ Market is taking applications for vendors, and the first market is scheduled for May 11, though of course the first week or two will be mostly handicrafts, not produce! Even garden starts are likely to wait until it warms up a little more. I’m thinking of trying Horse Power in CreateSpace, both to learn what’s involved and to have it to sell this summer at the market.

It will likely be well into July before carrots show up, though, and I’m eating the last of last year’s, bought at the Christmas Bazaar put on by the market. I don’t know how they got them to keep that long, as they must have been harvested in September at the latest. I’ve just kept them in the refrigerator, and they are still crisp and far sweeter than any I can buy at the supermarket. Alaska grows really good carrots; it’s too bad our season is so short.

Saroi (Cloudy) (A to Z Challenge)

(Possible spoilers for the first 30 pages of Homecoming.) Saroi, better known by her nickname of Cloudy, does not appear onstage in any of my books, but she plays an important role as Lai’s former lover, the woman who left him bereft. She was his nurse after his father, the only other R’il’nian alive, was killed in an accident, and it was her love and caring that pulled him back from near-suicidal grief. They became lovers, but Cloudy owed her white hair to a dominant gene that kept the nervous system from developing properly. An affected child born alive would be in severe pain and not sane in any normal sense. Cloudy had another dominant gene that confined the effects to white hair, but in theory one in four of her children would carry the Coven gene without the protective gene. The Genetics Board did not want to risk even a remote possibility of a projective telepath with Coven syndrome, so Cloudy was forbidden to have her sterilization (normal for all Central children before puberty) reversed.

She never spoke these words aloud; she remained silent until the end. But she may well have spoken them to herself.

I loved you, Lai, more than I could ever have told you. It tore my heart in two when I wrote you that note, begging you not to try to find me, and then tried everything in my power to hide my traces, to destroy my identity so thoroughly that even you could not find me.

I succeeded all too well. I was kidnapped and sold as a slave.

I lied when I said that life with you was destroying my privacy, but how could I have told you the truth without the Genetics Board finding out? It was a choice between you and the new life I carried within me, and I had to give your child, your son, a chance. Believe me, my love, nothing else could have induced me to leave you.

They have taken him from me, now, and I can only hope I have taught him to hide his abilities, so like yours, well enough that he can survive and keep clear of the Genetics Board.

I love you, Lai.

I’m doing my A to Z blogs from my books of the Jarnian Confederation, both characters and background information. For characters I’ll introduce them quickly, say what point of time they’re talking from since their situations change drastically through the books, and let them talk. The format of background information will vary according to what I’m talking about. Bold type indicates that more information has been or will be available in another A to Z post. All of these blogs will be scheduled to go live just after midnight Alaska time.